Frances Catherine Ihling | Frances Catherine Ihling music songs lullabies singer songwriter | Writinghttp://francescatherineihling.com/writing
Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0700Getting to the Foundationhttp://francescatherineihling.com/writing/getting_to_the_foundation
I’ve been meaning to share some thoughts on the topic of ear training as well as an update of the lullaby album, but it’s been an, often wonderfully so, but nonetheless, full-court-press crazy busy kind of time.

Also, I’ve been a bit stymied because, while listening to the roughs from the studio, which I brought home with me a couple weeks ago, certain I loved them all, was done with all the recordings, and that the next step was mixing and mastering, I discovered that a few songs probably should be re-sung after all…one due to a diction thing I inadvertently did which I think will make it less nice to listen to if I don’t re-record it, and other technical things I came across including that I am just not as melodically strong, as dead on center-certain as I should be in a couple of the songs, which puzzled and frustrated me.

As I mentioned in my last post, recording this album and getting to work with the fantastic musicians accompanying and recording me has been so educational (and inspirational) -- like years of music lessons compressed into a few weeks. When I asked the studio owner/musician Craig Dreyer for advice on the songs that were not as melodically strong, he quickly broke some big topics down into what are essentially principles and exercises of ear training that I’ve never actually considered before. As he aptly (but kindly) put it when I was struggling with a song I’d thought would be the easiest and fastest to record of the whole collection but which I got tripped up over: All you’ve got to do is sing in tune and in rhythm. The rest will take care of itself.

From having this experience and listening to the roughs over and over, realizing how often I practice without accompaniment or practice while doing other things, I decided to do as much ear training as I can, bone up on these foundational exercises before approaching the mic again, surround myself more in just the sounds of these particular songs.

So, during this busy time, when I haven’t been pretty much running around having a great time getting to be a part of whatever activity my daughter is up to, or running around busy with less fun but necessary tasks, I’ve been getting back to the music fundamentals. Hitting the practice rooms and setting up an old keyboard in my living room to practice with. And while this is proving useful, I cannot say that my smile in the picture here, just after one of these ear training sessions, is not one tinged with relief. However, I think that ear training, even just a bit and in small increments, is the single best exercise I can recommend to anyone who didn’t study music or needs to practice on the fly like I do.

Yesterday evening though, I didn’t practice intervals or play melodies while singing at a piano. Instead, I sat with my guitar in the kitchen playing and singing the soon to be re-sung lullabies.

It was the last thing I’d done of the day and I was pretty tired, not at my musical best. In fact, for a moment I wondered if any of my ear training had been progress yet. But then my daughter came in, sat next to me, and did something she’d never done before. She began to sing along with me, to sing her lullabies instead of listening to them. As we made our way through the songs, I realized that her energy and her voice was leading me through the melody this time, not the other way around. She also made some great suggestions, all of which I am using and will bring along with me next week when I am back at the microphone.

I can’t help but smile about my daughter helping me get ready during the home stretch of recording the lullabies I wrote for her...and that when I was getting a bit stuck, she led me through the songs I wrote for her.

But how could this not be the case? She inspired them all...every word and every note and all the spaces in between...

]]>http://francescatherineihling.com/writing/getting_to_the_foundationMon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0700Frances Catherine Ihling | Frances Catherine Ihling music songs lullabies singer songwriter | Writing(not) Ready, Set, Go!http://francescatherineihling.com/writing/not_ready_set_go
Late during the winter before this past one, I spent the afternoon with my grandmother after learning that she would need to have hospice care soon. Her 92 year old body was irreversibly shutting down, and I knew she would not remain lucid for long. I was so very grateful to be able to be with her and we sat in the sunshine near a big window and talked for the entire afternoon. She told stories, my favorite stories, about the important people of her past -- my grandfather, her best friend, her mother. In between stories, she asked me for reassurance that everyone in the family would be okay after she was gone, that I would be fine. I reassured her we would. In response to her worries about how hard I work, I told her how happy I am as a mom, that I am beginning to make music again, that my daughter and I have a bright future. She held my hand and smiled again and again as we spoke, and I looked at her as hard as I could, trying to carve every line of her lovely face, her lovely smile into my memory forever.

When evening approached, she was too tired to talk any longer and I had to get home. Trying to ease my grandmother's mind as we parted, I told her what my daughter and I would do that evening -- what I would make for dinner, the walk we would take, the homework and practicing that would take place in our little home. I told my grandmother that I would see her the next day and then, trying to cheer her up more, I blurted out that tomorrow night, I might even sing at a nearby open mic and, if I did, I would sing her song, a song I wrote about her and my grandfather not long ago.

My grandmother beamed at me. Please, sing my song -- she said.

The next day was complete chaos though. My mind was chaotic thinking about my grandmother who had seemed well only a week ago. My daughter became sick during the school day and I spent my lunch hour in the pediatrician’s office with her. The afternoon was a blur of juggling my day job and taking care of my daughter, and in the evening as I was making dinner I realized that I would be late to the open mic even if I didn’t take the time to warm up my voice before going or, worse yet, my hands. I didn’t have an accompanist and this would be one of the first times I would accompany myself on guitar before an audience.Truthfully, I wasn’t ready to perform and I knew it. What had I been thinking telling my grandmother I would sing her song???

I thought of her strength and her smile though, of her faith in me and her constant love and, buoyed by this, held up by the strength, grace, and grit that love can help us find, I raced out the door, my guitar in hand.

By the time I arrived to the open mic, all but one slot for performing had been taken. This slot was the first one of the night and to take it, I’d have to play immediately. I had no time to get a feeling for the audience, the space, the sound there...I was worried but I tuned up and approached the microphone, reassuring myself that I’d be fine, that all the performance experience from my past would come back to me as soon as I began to sing.

But it didn’t. In the past, I had time to prepare before gigs, I had accompanists, I had sleep. In the past, I was a decade younger and I wasn’t juggling motherhood, a day job, tasks at home, and dreams. In the past, I had the luxury of practicing for hours each day, rehearsing for just as long and, as such, I had the luxury of not making mistakes during a performance.

So I was completely taken aback when I made one mistake after another. Noticeable mistakes. My hands shook. I dropped notes from the accompaniment. Even my voice, which I could always count on, seemed to waver and betray me. Horrified and not sure if I should just walk away and accept that I could not make music amidst all else I had to do, at least not that day, I stopped playing. For one horrible moment I was truly at a loss and then I heard my voice, not singing but talking, telling the story of my day and explaining that sadly my playing was as hectic as my day had been. I could see people in the audience smiling then and I could feel them encouraging me. Like my grandmother, they were giving me strength. So I began again, not playing or singing as well as I could have, but I got through the three songs. I was very disappointed in how the performance had turned out. I figured I probably wasn’t able to really perform yet. I knew it was important that I’d tried but I also felt I’d failed..

What I didn’t know then, however, is that a musician who heard me that night would follow up with me to form a band. He had really liked my songs and my voice and knew that with the support of a band, I could accomplish so much more. He was right and the band we started has become the foundation for the one I work with today. Being a part of it has led me to co-writing songs, recording, music ideas, plans and performances far removed from the experience at that open mic. My terrible time there was the beginning of setting the foundation for the music I am making now. It was the seed from which a lot of the music I am making today has grown.

I told this story to classmates at my 20th college reunion this past weekend. We had been talking about how certain we had been about our post-graduation plans, that we (thought we) had known exactly what paths we would take, but that the detours we willingly or unwillingly took from these paths, were often the richest, most formative, and often most important parts of journeys. We spoke about the fact that often we did not feel ready for these detours, but they happened anyway. We spoke about the tendency for so many of us to wait until we are ‘ready’ to do something, until we know it will be ‘good, enough’, until we are certain that there is no risk of failure, but that so many of our best times or biggest achievements happened because we acted before we were ready, certain, or safe.

I am so glad I didn’t wait until I was ready to go to that open mic.

My grandmother spent almost two weeks in hospice with family at her bedside the entire time. Mostly she slept and rested but when she woke, she smiled and said ‘You’re here!’ every time she saw me. Some nights, after everyone was asleep, in fact when it seemed that the whole world was asleep and that only she and I were in it, I sang lullabies to her. I told her I sang her song and that I would keep singing it. I thanked her again and again for everything she had done for me. I thanked her for the strength she gave me, for her example of a life well lived and well loved.

Many songs later, I now know that when you sing to an audience, they can give you strength too, that when you conquer your fears and go out into the community to share your dream, even if you don’t succeed, everyone wins. Spending time with the amazing women I went to school with, who, twenty years later are so much further on their career paths than I am, reminded me of this lesson again. Truthfully, I didn’t feel ‘ready’ to attend my 20th reunion. I didn’t feel accomplished enough. I felt that my time since graduation had surely been too different from those of my classmates, who are professional dancers, writers, leaders of NGOs and humanitarian efforts, professors, directors of companies and classrooms. However, this wasn’t the case and, instead, I was strengthened by the time I spent with these successful, strong and very smart women. I was reminded by our stories and our joy to continue to not wait until I am ‘ready’ to try for whatever good lies ahead of me. I was reminded that, always, we are buoyed by our collective strength and love.

]]>http://francescatherineihling.com/writing/not_ready_set_goWed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0700Frances Catherine Ihling | Frances Catherine Ihling music songs lullabies singer songwriter | WritingHope, Fall, Get Up (repeat, repeat, repeat)http://francescatherineihling.com/writing/hope_fall_get_up_repeat_repeat_repeat
I went to a yoga class very early yesterday morning where the teacher told us that the theme for that class would be hope. She encouraged us to picture someone or something that makes us feel hopeful and reach toward this image throughout the class. She encouraged us to think of our hope when the class got challenging, of course to take breaks when needed, but to continue to reach, reach toward hope and see where this would take us.

I thought about recent emails and the kind and encouraging words people have sent or said to me, as pertains to the writing I posted here last week about beginning to sing again. For this and many other reasons, I have no lack of hope. In fact, I feel brimming with it despite that getting back on the path toward music has, mostly, been incredibly challenging.

Yoga class started and, half awake and not completely warmed up, I took things slowly. I thought of hope but, unlike usual, I didn’t challenge myself too much, opting for easier versions of poses over more demanding ones. However, as I warmed up and began to feel the world waking up and lighting up the space around all of us hopeful yoga students, I began to have fun, trying more challenging poses and pushing my limits. Toward the very end of class, we found ourselves in dolphin pose (http://www.yogajournal.com/pose/dolphin-pose/). Our teacher encouraged us and said, “if you’d like to go from dolphin into a forearm balance, go for it!”

Now, I have recently begun to be able to do forearm balances, in other words balancing on my forearms in dolphin pose with feet stretched up to the sky, and I am very very excited about this. Other than singing, it is the closest thing I can think of to flying while feeling completely grounded. Cool, right? So, although it was the end of class, and I surely felt the physical challenge of this, the hope in me, said: Go for it! YES!

And I did, of course! I lifted into the forearm balance, excited to fly, and instead completely lost my balance. I didn’t lose my balance gracefully and I didn’t lose it a little bit. I lost it so much that I couldn’t regain enough balance to simply step back out of the pose onto the ground. Instead, I stayed stuck upside down, shifting and swaying all around, like an upturned tree in a storm, trying desperately to steady my core, to push my forearms into my sweaty and ever more slippery mat, and then my torso twisted, my arms slipped, and I fell to the floor with a crash.

Thankfully, I didn’t get hurt, so I got up, brushed myself off and moved into the next pose, feeling a little foolish but also smiling because really when you fall from flying and don’t get hurt, what else can you do?

I can’t help thinking that my journey back to music has been exactly like this. Hoping, falling, getting up. Hoping, falling, getting up. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I can’t begin to describe how much more failure than success there has been or how grateful I am for the support I’ve received to hope, fall, and get up again. So thank you, again, to those who shared such kind, encouraging and so very appreciated words and helpful advice or ideas recently or in the more distant past. I am holding every single one of them in my heart.

This week, I began rehearsals for my lullaby project. The plan is to record a full cd of the lullabies this summer and begin performing them for children living in difficult circumstances and in community centers. I am still laying out the groundwork for how to make this happen and although a foundation is taking shape, right now I sure don’t have everything in place and some necessary items on the list of how to make this happen are still very much in the ‘hopeful category’ verses the ‘possible and likely category’. I wrote a new lullaby recently though that will be included in the collection and, so, I am feeling hopeful!

Somebody said something really nice to me after yesterday’s yoga class, too. I don’t know who she is but I thank her as well. As I was leaving, she approached me and said, “ It’s so great that you fell. It means you went for the challenge!”

I hope everyone is having a happy Memorial day weekend. May we all be hopeful together and, as necessary, may we hope, fall, get up, and repeat, repeat, repeat!

When I went to college, studying music was the furthest thing from my mind. Although I’d always sung in choirs, musicals, and a cappella groups in high school, I had no formal music training or education. One of my roommates, however, had an extensive background in both and she encouraged me to audition with her for studio voice lessons at Barnard. When I arrived at the audition, it seemed as though hundreds of other students were there, all singing opera and other complicated pieces I’d never even heard, let alone dreamed of singing. Certain I didn’t belong there, I turned to leave the building, but ran into my roommate on the way out. She dragged me back in, my shaking hands holding the sheet music for the sweet, simple song the piano accompanist would play at my audition. When the accompanist began playing, I realized that the sheet music was written much lower than the key in which I, with my high soprano voice, had practiced the song. Panicked, I closed my eyes, put my hand on the piano, took a deep breath, and sang anyway. After what seemed to me an endless performance, the judges asked me why I wanted to take voice lessons. I had no answer for them other than that I loved to sing. Looking back, I wonder if that simple expression of joy is what won them over.

Later that semester, one of my voice lessons was life-changing. I was struggling with a piece of classical music that I still couldn’t read, and at the moment felt I couldn’t speak, let alone sing, amidst simultaneously juggling tests, writing papers, doing lab reports, singing at Bacchantae a cappella rehearsals, and navigating the complexities of the social life of a young Barnard woman, when my voice teacher, Lynn Owen, halted me in the middle of the song. She stopped playing the piano accompaniment, turned to me, and said: “You’ve just got to sing through everything. You sing through the good. You sing through the bad. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. You just sing.” Neither of us could have realized it at the time but these words were transformative in my life.

I majored in Psychology at Barnard and, when I graduated, my plan was to continue pursuing the subject in graduate school. To further this goal, I began working in a bio-psychology research lab nearby at Columbia University’s hospital. At the same time, I also began singing at open mics, singing for musician friends who needed a back-up vocalist, or who needed a vocalist for recording a demo of a song they’d written. Little by little, music started trickling into all areas of my life. I’d sing while running an experiment alone in the lab or re-string my guitar while waiting for data to download. I sang lullabies to my actress roommate when she couldn’t sleep. I wrote my first song on a train ride from New York to Philadelphia on my way to a rehearsal there. Then I wrote another song and another.

When I was encouraged to apply to the graduate psychology program affiliated with the lab I was working in, I had a tough decision to make. Should I go to graduate school or start taking singing more seriously? I took a leap, and decided on singing.

I quickly learned that this was a pretty big leap indeed. I hadn’t counted on the multiple day jobs I’d need to support my singing ‘habit,’ or how my lack of education in music would mean I’d have to work very hard to learn new material whenever a possible gig popped up. But it was a wonderful leap. As a young Barnard alumnae, it brought me to living in Europe and marrying a musician there. Living with this leap later led me back home to New Jersey, where I went through a painful divorce, followed by life as a single mother. However, I had a great day job at a university as an executive assistant and I loved my life, raising my then toddler-aged daughter on my own. Nonetheless, my days began very early and ended very late, and I wasn’t sure how I’d ever sing again. For a time, in fact, I didn’t but I was content, feeling that my daughter was my song now. I told myself that if I’d made all the music I could, at least I’d gone for it when I had the chance, and that now I was in a new, very challenging, but even more wonderful chapter of my life.

As my daughter progressed through elementary school, however, I had a feeling, a strong feeling that I was supposed to sing again, that I wanted to sing again. It seemed an unreasonable desire, and I struggled with the idea, but one day I pulled out my old vocal exercises from my teacher at Barnard. As I went through them, I began remembering my voice again. It felt wonderful. It felt like coming home. But it still seemed impossible to try to ‘really’ sing again.

My ‘story,’ at that time, when I tried to tell people what being a single parent was like, was about how some other single moms and I had tried to put together a support group for each other, but none of us had enough time to attend it, and it never got off the ground. Being a single mom is a pretty busy profession and most days I had only a handful of minutes to sing amidst the busy-ness of my job at the university, cooking, doing laundry, pushing my daughter around in the shopping cart at the grocery store where she practiced her reading aloud as we’d zoom through the store, playdates, dance lessons, more homework, and going to the playground where we would swing together almost every evening. But I promised myself that every day I would find five minutes to sing. Sometimes the five minutes would stretch to twenty or even more, and every day, through the harder days and through the easier days, the good and bad ones, for however much time I had, I sang just as Lynn Owen had told me. I just sang.

Some time into this, an idea for a song came to me, something that hadn’t happened in a very long time, and then another idea for a song came, and another. Today, I am amazed, I am thrilled beyond any description to say that I sang these same songs recently with my band-mates in our first concert together and that I am creating a lullaby project based on the lullabies I wrote for my daughter during those busy, hard years, a project through which I aim to help other mothers and children in difficult situations, situations much more difficult than anything I, as a Barnard graduate, have had to endure. This summer, I will sing those lullabies to children and their mothers who are living in a nearby homeless shelter and I am even prouder to say that I learned about the possibility of sharing music at this shelter from my now middle school-aged daughter, who performed there with her flute last winter.

When I was selecting a quote for my yearbook entry during my senior year at Barnard, I had my eyes on a totally different future, but the quote I chose, from an E.E. Cummings poem, is about the life I have today:

I’d rather learn from one bird how to singthan teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

I did learn ‘from one bird’ how to sing. More importantly, I learned how not to quit, how not to give up ever, to follow my calling no matter what else, good or bad, is going on in my life, and I am teaching this to my daughter every day.